'There was a real energy in the PFS board room to get on with things'

"There was a real energy in the room to get on with things," he says, describing his colleagues as a good mix of financial planners and people with strong backgrounds in governance.

Grant, a former PFS president who served on the body's board during the implementation of the Retail Distribution Review in 2013, was brought back as an institute director by the Chartered Insurance Institute with a view to future-proofing the ailing body for its 40,000 members.

The PFS had been in a spat with its parent body, the CII, for the best part of three years and has seen several board members depart as a result.

There were disagreements over the use of certain funds and, most recently, the CII's appointment of directors to the board, with some board members questioning what this means for the PFS's independence.

Grant says he came back because of his past experience with the PFS. "No one else has got previous experience so I'm unique amongst the group.

"But the other thing is, what the PFS board now is made up of is a mixture. You've got some financial planners on the board but also you've got some people who have got some really strong background in governance. 

"And, you know, one of the things we're working through is we're making sure that the PFS is going to have the infrastructure for the future."

The issues stem from people who are no longer there.

He says the future of the PFS will be defined by the value it offers to its members. There is a strategy day scheduled for late August, which will be all about making sure the PFS is fit for purpose, that it has the right infrastructure in place, and that the executive team is supported in helping the members achieve good client outcomes.

"What we have read over the past 12 months is, we read a lot of stuff that wasn't about the membership and wasn't about better outcomes for clients. And that's not what I would hope to see a professional body do," Grant says.

"What we need to do is make sure the money is there for members to get value out of it. That's absolutely key. So for me, this is all about making sure that we put the members front and centre."

He waves off any suggestion that he's been brought in to repair damage between the PFS and CII and says instead it is time to look forward.

"The issues stem from people who are no longer there. You've got a new chief executive on the PFS, you've got a new chief executive on CII, you've got people that want to work things through, that want to make sure that actually we become absolutely member focused, you've got a new board that absolutely wants to be member focused.

"So my job is, you know, an elder statesman to a certain extent, to try and help them achieve that."

He adds: "We want to set ourselves up for success. And I think that's absolutely key. What I absolutely want to do is help the PFS and ensure members get value for money and for me that's the only reason I'm there."

Grant, who is also a qualified adviser, has worked in financial services for more than 30 years, having initially responded to an advert offering "flashing lights money", enough to convince him to leave behind his management career at McDonald's.

Having spent a couple of years as a sales manager at Providence Capital, during which his manager was replaced resulting in a change of direction for the firm, he joined an established insurer as a broker consultant in search for stability.

"And the first thing that happened to me within a month was they had a major restructure."

Having survived the restructure, several years and a few jobs later Grant ended up at St James's Place. When SJP then bought Technical Connection in 2016 he was brought in to help with the succession planning and transitioning of the support services provider into the bigger SJP firm.

Today, Technical Connection Limited runs independently of its owner and caters to the wider marketplace, while SJP has an in-house team of the same name catering to its adviser partners. Grant is a director at SJP and at Technical Connection Limited.

"What we wanted to do was to ensure that the marketplace had a place to go for technical support," he says.

Indeed, the advice market is undergoing its biggest regulatory shift since the RDR this year, in the form of the consumer duty, which took effect at the end of July.

"From our perspective, consumer duty is a massive change in regulation and what I think it will do is... it will help enhance the value of advice, it will put greater emphasis on the need to demonstrate the value of advice."

This will be particularly relevant when dealing with vulnerable clients, Grant says.

"One of the things with vulnerable clients is everyone perceives them to be the older client, the 70 or 80-year-old client; the reality is a 30-year-old with mental health issues, or someone who inherits money with no experience of investing, and all the other spectrum of vulnerability, including relationship breakdowns.

"So what you need to do is make sure that your communication is appropriate for that circumstance.

"So I think it's a good thing that consumer duty has put that emphasis on consumer understanding, and vulnerability is mentioned 109 times in the original consumer duty note, so it's a massive focus on vulnerability and I think that's a really positive aspect."

Grant says the consumer duty will also give greater clarity on products as manufacturers think more about their suitability and target markets.

But a challenge he pointed to, which could hit smaller firms in particular, is the amount of due diligence that will be required on products to ensure ongoing suitability.

"I think the fact that you need to continually review suitability with ongoing advice and documenting it, thinking about funds and everything else, that's probably another area that obviously consumer duty would drive change over a period of time."

This could include opening up lines of communications with providers. "How people would do that, the sheer logistics of it, I think will be a challenge for some organisations.

"You may find you wonder how many products and providers you can actually maintain if you're a small organisation."

But this does not spell the death of IFAs who, he says, have always been "entrepreneurial... and will work their way through it".

Adapting advice

Grant says everyone can benefit from sitting down with a financial planner.

He adds it is his personal mission to engage his family in their financial planning so if something happened to him they do not experience a shock.

"I ensured that I found a financial planner that my wife gets on with," he says. "It's really important that financial plans think about the whole family."

Grant does not think it is true that the majority of people cannot afford advice because "there is a whole range of different models out there for clients from online to face-to-face." And there is always an opportunity to find a model that works, he says.

But he admits there is a problem with people perceiving advice to be too expensive.

Once demand for cheaper services picks up, more supply will follow, he says. "What we need to do in the UK is we need to make it as easy to save money as it is to borrow money.

"What we've now got is a situation where we've lost that culture of savings, we've lost the value of advice with some clients. And so what we need to do is we need to build that back. So for me, that is something that's really important.

"I think that actually what you'll find is as we demonstrate the value of advice the supply of the service will appear."

Making advice more accessible is something the regulator can help with by making it easier and cheaper to open client files, according to Grant.

The Financial Conduct Authority had planned a regime of simplified advice but has shelved these plans, saying there was little interest from the industry. It will look at the issue again as part of its review of the advice-guidance boundary.

"They talked about having a model where they had less qualifications for certain types of savings. I just think that we need to work out a way of making it economic for people to save and take advice," says Grant.

"You actually need an adviser to help you to put all the things in place, to nudge you when you need to do things. And the other thing about financial advisers, which I think is totally underestimated, is around the non-financial value of advice for and around vulnerability. 

"I think everyone always focuses on the monetary amount but they forget the non-financial value of advice.

"That's what financial planning is, to take you through what seems impossible and help you actually understand it, demystify it, and then set you on a path so that you can actually achieve your goals and aspirations."

carmen.reichman@ft.com